'Anthropology of a Phytomorphist', conversation with TJ Shin and Neel Ahuja, moderated by Godfre Leung
INTRODUCTORY TEXT BY GODFRE LEUNG
Theorist Neel Ahuja’s 2015 article “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions” ends: “At the heart of the body and the future lies the corpse.” This resonates with a couplet from artist TJ Shin’s video essay Anthropology of a Phytomorphist (2021–’22): “To be diseased is to be alive/To cure something is to make it dead.” These counterintuitive upendings of the life/death binary issue powerful challenges to anthropocentric temporalities and, more broadly, to human-centred discourses, behaviour, and infrastructures. Staring down planetary crisis, Shin and Ahuja think speculatively on new, non-extractive intimacies and entanglements.
This conversation between Shin and Ahuja followed an online screening of Anthropology of a Phytomorphist, which debuted as part of Shin’s solo exhibition The Vegetarian at The Bows in the summer of 2022.
Anthropology of a Phytomorphist recounts a material history of mugwort, from its metamorphic properties in the Korean origin myth to turn a bear into the first human, to its use as an anti-malarial agent during the Vietnamese-American War. Woven into this narrative are the stories of John MacCulloch, the Scottish geologist who introduced the word malaria to the English language; Tu Youyou, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who developed an anti-malarial agent from the annals of Traditional Chinese Medicine; and Yeong-hye, the protagonist of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, who relinquishes her humanity and transforms into a plant. Alongside this poetic meditation on disease, ecology, and the more-than-human, Shin emplots documentation of the transfection of their own DNA into mugwort plant, a process that is part formal lab experiment, part (auto-)science fiction.
TJ Shin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles (traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of Gabrielino/Tongva Peoples). Inspired by decentralized ecologies and queer sociality, they create living installations and imagine an ever-expanding self that exists beyond the boundaries of one's skin. Shin was a 2020 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow and 2020 Visiting Artist Fellow at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. Shin has exhibited internationally at the Queens Museum, Lewis Center for the Arts, Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center, The Bows, Doosan Gallery, Knockdown Center, and more.
Neel Ahuja is Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park, located on the unceded lands of the Piscataway people. He is the author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016) and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (2021).
Godfre Leung is a critic and curator. His writing has recently appeared in ArtAsiaPacific and ReIssue, and his recent exhibitions include “Offsite: Christopher K. Ho” (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2022) and “TJ Shin: The Vegetarian” (The Bows, 2022). He is the curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations.
